Month: January 2011

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

Why do you assume liberals who watched Keith Olbermann didn’t do those other things too?  I subscribe to Washington Monthly, I read the NYTimes daily, I have read Tocqueville, I read political blogs daily…and I still enjoyed watching Keith (in fact I usually did some of those other things WHILE watching Keith).

I’ve been a liberal for about 45 years.  Ever since Ronald Reagan the right has stopped treating the left as fellow Americans who have different ideas and began treating us as a dangerous, hated enemy that had to be annihilated to save the country for “real” Americans.  It has gotten increasingly ugly and most liberals I know feel vaguely unwelcome in our own country now.   

Until Keith there was almost no one on television that presented our side.  Keith shared our sense of outrage, he called out the angry anti-left bloviators like Bill O’Reilly.  Keith didn’t make us angry, we already were.  He allowed us to release our anger, to blow off  steam.  We felt relieved knowing someone else got it and was allowed to say it on TV.  It gave us hope for the future of America knowing that someone had been able to break through the unofficial ban on anything liberal on TV.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

The core mistake people are making is misreading what happens when the imply death in video games?

Video games’ convention of disappearing bodies doesn’t signify death. It signifies defeat. Certainly, this defeat may come with death, but not necessarily. Defeat can come just as easily by being rendered unconscious or otherwise disabled.  It’s inefficient for game designers to devote resources to rendering objects that are no longer relevant to gameplay.

It would be ambiguous in the case of Angry Birds if the narrative context didn’t clarify things by providing animations at the close of its chapters. In these, we see the reappeared pigs lying bruised, beaten, and bandaged at the feet of their avian vanquishers. The pigs are defeated, dispirited, but not dead.

Well the black round birds, which explode like suicide bombers, certainly die.

by Patrick Appel

Tony Dokoupil points to research finding that female members of the House outperform their male counterparts. The reason:

If women are, as a matter of fact, the country's most persuasive and productive politicians, why do more than one in five Americans still openly admit they wouldn't vote for a female president, or would do so only with reservations? But in fact, says Berry, the two trends fit together handily. "If it's harder for women to succeed in politics," he says, "then those that do succeed are likely to be the most talented and hard working."

It's called "The Jackie (and Jill) Robinson Effect," as the AJPS paper is titled, a reference to the first black player in Major League Baseball who, not coincidentally, was one of best ballplayers of all time. Black players continued to outperform their white peers for decades after integration because, with latent racism still very much a part of baseball’s culture, you had to be better than average to measure up. Over time, of course, that performance gap between white and black players evaporated as race-based obstacles fell away. But in the short term, teams like the Dodgers, which won six pennants and a World Series with Robinson, benefited greatly.

by Patrick Appel

Jesse Bering defends his article against the onslaught:

Strange, is it not, that such grievous concerns about the science of evolutionary psychology—in particular, whether its central hypotheses are falsifiable, whether reporters should be so enthusiastic in reporting its results, and whether its methods are adequate—seem to appear at some times but not others? Where were these same outraged critics, I wonder, when I wrote enthusiastically about the evolutionary psychology of humor, blushing, athletics, male body odor, suicide, and cannibalism?

Yet whenever the issue at hand relates to female sexuality—whether it's the prevention of rape or the evolution of female orgasm, the field's most outspoken opponents turn up in droves. We do need to clear up a few misunderstandings about the science. But I would like to know what we are really, truly, talking about here. Is this a debate over quality control in a particular academic field or a battle over politics and ideology? I wish I could believe it were only about the science. When the skeptics chime in, I suspect they are egged on by politicized reactants.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Mark Oppenheimer wonders if snobbery belongs on the list of things a responsible family man must abandon: 

Yes, because snobbery is ultimately a dysfunction, and if my daughters were to lose potential close friendships, and someday lovers or partners, because of the trivia they imbibed, via their father, from The Official Preppy Handbook and Class, then I would have a lot to answer for. And once you learn snobbery, it is very hard to unlearn. They would be wrecked for life, like me. Also, of course, snobbery is immoral. It is unkind, and frequently vicious, and built upon lies about what other people are really like.

And yet I am not convinced that I can give up snobbery so quickly. Because as much as it could harm my daughters, it could also make them Oppenheimers. For after all, snobbery is one of the great midwives of human closeness. Almost nothing I can think of unites two people better than shared snobberies. I never feel more married to my wife than when we enter another couple's house for the first time and, on seeing that the television is a bit too large, or too prominently placed in the front room, look at one another and—well, I was going to say "arch out eyebrows," but of course we do not even need to do that. The mere look, the meeting of the eyes, does it all.

by Patrick Appel

Weigel is unimpressed by it:

Voters think the economy is going to recover. The president has recovered in the polls before, and the recovery has always come when voters think they're going to get jobs again. In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 40 percent of people polled said the economy would improve "during the next 12 months," and 17 percent said it would get worse. But people were even more optimistic in September 2009. That month, 47 percent said the economy would improve, and 20 percent said it would get worse.

No news there: If the economy improves, voters will look more warmly on president Obama. If it doesn't, Obama is going through his latest false dawn.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I'm continually surprised at how many people don't understand the three-fifths compromise in the original U.S. Constitution, usually describing it somewhat like Cord Jefferson does: "the three-fifths compromise, in which the government decided that black slaves were subhuman". The clear implication here that the Constitution codified a black slave was worth only 60% of a normal human, because they didn't count as much as "free Persons" in establishing proportional representation in the House.

But this understanding is completely backwards; black slaves would have been better off if the Constitution counted them at one-fifth, or not at all.  The southern states would have been much happier had the slaves counted as whole persons, or better yet, 5 persons each! 

Why?  Because it would have meant that the southern, slaveowning, states would have had even greater control of the House and the Electoral College than they initially ended up with (it's no accident thay 9 of the first 12 presidents were Southern).  Since slaves couldn't vote, they were not being counted as people, but as property, giving greater political power to their owners.  It was the northern states that pushed to have slaves not count at all in apportioning representatives (and "direct Taxes"), but since the southern states were both less populous and outnumbered (8-5, or 16-10 in the Senate-to-be), concessions such as this were thought necessary to gain their ratification of the Constitution and entry into the Union.

Today on the Dish, Conor raged against the cable news machine and wasn't too broken up over Olbermann's anouncement. Patrick parsed the cult of Palin and Douthat's dismissal of her, while Andrew took a sick day. Conor raised concerns about Obamacare, took Rich Lowry to task, and rallied for a political blogosphere with lots of parties and cliques. We rounded up reactions to the abortion crimes of Dr. Gosnell, William Saletan challenged pro-choice writers, and readers chimed in on the connection between abortion and slavery. Tunisia's press hit a bump in the road, Alexis Madrigal went behind the scenes for Facebook's compromised security, and Joshua Foust helped put a bombed Afghan city in context. Chris Rovzar urged us not to overstate Giffords' recovery, and Jen Paton connected the dots between Loughner's insanity and McVeigh's terrorism.

Frum infused Obama's SOTU with some Bushisms, Don Taylor lobbied for left-wing deficit hawks, and Conor challenged David Brooks to think outside his box. Palin could paint Texas purple, and even Limbaugh's callers nailed him on being a nutbag. The Tea Party Patriots put everything in the budget on the table, Bernstein yawned at Cilliza's analysis, and Ezra Klein picked at the low-hanging fruit in the GOP's healthcare qualms. Bloomberg might save us from ourselves, Jamelle Bouie argued European multiculturalism doesn't have the same implications as America's, and Yglesias shilled for dental hygenists.

More friends made us more popular, Ebert learned to love his lack of a chin, and we dove back into the ideology and science of Angry Birds. Novice-like teachers intrigued students, the bubble of higher education came closer to popping, and Chinese youths escaped via fake Facebooks. Young women envied a prostitute's life, and Conor asked whether local newspapers are enough. Beagles needed love, and Conor penned the trailer copy for Aaron Sorkin's new John Edwards vehicle. The artist himself closed the books on Calvin & Hobbes, Ferris Bueller could also apply to a Fight Club treatment, and horoscopes all say the same thing. 

VFYW here, beardage watch here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

–Z.P.

by Chris Bodenner

This is heartbreaking on so many levels:

Beagles are the most popular breed for testing pharmaceuticals, household products and cosmetics because of their friendly, docile, trusting, forgiving and people-pleasing personalities. The research industry says they adapt well to living in a cage and are inexpensive to feed.

And most never see the light of day – literally. But the Beagle Freedom Project is off to the rescue:

With time, patience, play, companionship — and most of all, love — these dogs will embrace their new-found freedom and learn how to become dogs. Just watch the video. Their transformation is nothing short of amazing.

by Chris Bodenner

In an interview with Brian Bedford, the cross-dressing star of The Importance of Being Earnest, Kevin Sessums shares a fascinating anecdote from the life of Oscar Wilde:

I read his collected letters a few summers ago. As a lapsed Mississippian, one of the most shocking to me regarded his visit with [Confederate President] Jefferson Davis down at Davis' home in Biloxi. Wilde had stated on one of his reading tours of the States that the one man he wanted to meet was Davis because he found such similarities between the South and Ireland. He spent the night with the Davis family and even left them an inscribed photograph of himself which was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. The mind boggles at that meeting.